Institutional Green
by Kount Xero
Summary: Drabble.  I wanted to have Tyler present in a story, this is what came out: seven drabbles  one for each line of "Beneath the Skin"  about Brigitte's perception of her stay in the Happier Times Care Center.  Contains swearing.  Please read and review.
1. Beneath the Skin

"_**Institutional Green"**_

_Author's Note: I don't own anything. The lyrics of "Beneath the Skin" belong to both Mike Shields and Kurt Swinghammer._

**1. Beneath the Skin  
><strong>**(White)**

The mornings in the care center are white.

White light, reflected off of pure white snow bleeds through the window. The window frame, white, partially covered by white curtains always is the first thing she sees when waking up. It frames the bleak white sky.

And just as well, because Brigitte always wakes up to white-hot pain, from her head to her toes, coursing through her veins and she holds the sheets, white-knuckle tight. It's the sign of the losing battle her white blood cells are fighting. It reminds her that beneath the skin, there is something lurking, crawling, biding it's time, slowly eating away at her, consuming her. Until there is nothing left.

There aren't any white streaks in her hair, but soon, she expects. Soon.

Every morning, Brigitte wakes up, and checks the window. Pulls it open a bit, sniffs the air. Wonders if he is out there, in the white, coming closer. Nothing. Maybe tomorrow, maybe a month, a year, a century later, but sooner or later and sooner _than _later, he will be there, she knows.


	2. The Beast Within

"_**Institutional Green"**_

**2. The Beast Within  
><strong>**(Blue)**

Tyler's eyes are blue.

They are a cold, sharp blue, vicious and full of focus. They pierce, drill holes in your mind just by looking at you – the amount of attention channeled into a single stare is almost impossible to withstand. There is mischief in that stare, blue mischief, full of fun but with a sharper, darker edge. And he's watching her, she can tell – those blue eyes trace her whenever she walks within visual range, which means she has a blue tracker on her whenever she restlessly roams the corridors.

Sometimes, he deliberately gets close. He brushes up against her, his green coveralls sliding across her clothes, or sometimes he lingers more than he should at a threshold.

The beast within wants those blue eyes, in a bad way. Wants to look into them as she fucks his brains out, look into them as he comes. Wants to pluck them out and slowly eat them, feel them crunch between jaws and release some of that mischief. Wants to lick them and taste his soul. Wants to rip them out and keep them.

Wants to look into them as life leaves them and they become dull, glass eyes, dead blue.


	3. Dying to Be

"_**Institutional Green"**_

**3. Dying to Be  
><strong>**(Gray)**

Everyone in the care center is gray.

They are all dying to be something other than that in-between, that never quite departed nor quite arrived, neither here nor there existence.

The girls are all dying to be victims and perpetrators. Victims of their own addictions, their own pointless, cyclical vices that follow high, euphoria, tipping point, comedown, withdrawal without fail. Perpetrators of their lives' slow descent into the gray, into methadone treatments, and into Tyler's backroom deals. Perpetrators and victims, simultaneously, of slow suicide.

Brigitte wanders through their world, smelling of antiseptic and linoleum, as a black spot. She sits with their gray thoughts and gray existences fading in and out of her white and black world during group therapy. She lets Ghost's ramblings, full of different shades of gray, neither totally fact nor totally fiction, accompany her at times.

Brigitte Fitzgerald, however, isn't gray. She knows she's slipping further and further into the black the longer she stays in her new home full of white and blue and gray.


	4. Beneath the Stars

"_**Institutional Green"**_

**4. Beneath the Stars  
><strong>**(Black)**

The nights in the care center are black.

Brigitte lays herself to sleep, the dim bedside light painting the blackest shadows across the room and she listens to Ginger's pitch-black premonitions and portends of doom. She can only get comfortable with the pain if she lies sideways and goes fetal. Even then, Ginger coursing through her creates black spots in front of her eyes.

So Brigitte shuts her eyes, not to sleep, but just not to see anything. She feels the world dissolve in the black behind her eyelids. Her surroundings are stripped away, the walls crumble and everything, the hospital, every other building in the world and all the people, they all are sucked into the black hole created by her eyes closing.

So Brigitte closes her eyes, keeps them closed and feels the bed and herself become the only two things in all the universe and that is when, for a short while, she can feel absolutely free, comfortably naked beneath the stars.


	5. Tears and Scars

"_**Institutional Green"**_

**5. Tears and Scars  
><strong>**(Red)**

The blood dripping onto the tiles is red.

Brigitte considers this a good thing. The redder the better, and the darker the shade, the more she digs it, because it's worse the paler it is. Paler means it's healing. And the closer the mark is to white, the worse off she is.

She keeps time. Her journal is a testament to her time running out, and every time she tears into her skin, she makes another entry. Takes a step closer to the end.

She can't cut anywhere but her thighs, anywhere else and the scars would be seen. She has scars running down her thighs, all bunched up together. Sometimes, she cuts right across the scars just for the fuck of it. It won't matter, anyway.

And sometimes, just sometimes, when she sits on the toilet, lowers her pants and prepares to press the glass shard with a red stain on its tip onto her skin, she is tempted to slide it a bit inwards. Over her femoral artery. Cut loose, cut everything loose and paint everything red and be done with it. Just sometimes.


	6. Heal Again

"_**Institutional Green"**_

**6. Heal Again  
><strong>**(Pink)**

The mark of healing is pink.

It's pale and dreamy and girly pink, disgusting pink. Her flesh, pink and swollen slightly. Tender like a goddamn virgin next door and untouchable like a fucking tease.

The healing is demanding like a slut: more wounds, more gashes, more cuts, more damage... but when Brigitte gives to the healing what it wants, it starts to bitch. Pain, ache, dull, throbbing, burning – recorded on the lines of her diary and created by a piece of glass that once hid happier times behind.

It's all like touching herself by this point – Brigitte knows every wound, and she hardly sees the point of it. No matter what she does, or how good she does it, it'll just heal again.


	7. Till the End

"_**Institutional Green"**_

**7. Till the End  
><strong>**(Colorless)**

The water pouring into the tub is colorless.

Brigitte doesn't like the water that much anymore, and she guesses it has nothing to do with what's in her veins, or what she just can't get in them. The tub is colorless also, and so other many other things that Brigitte expects to have colors, lack that intrinsic quality. Oh, there is some element of color in everything, different shades that she can sort of sense belonging to different colors, but not as she remembers, not as vibrant.

Everything around her is dissolving into a bleak, nigh-monochrome, pale shade of itself, because her eyes are mutating and she can't see the colors anymore.


End file.
